Ed Boyden, a researcher at MIT, is at the forefront of a new science that aims to map and even heal the brain with light. It’s called optogenetics, and the journal Science has called it one of the great insights of the 21st century. It’s in its early days, but the goal is to one day be able to take a disease like depression, PTSD, or epilepsy and, using bursts of light, just turn it off -- the same way you’d fix a software glitch in a computer.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Michael Pollan tells Judith Strasser where the American front lawn came from, and what it has come to symbolize.
What happens when you discover racial fear in yourself? Rachel Shadoan recently reached an uncomfortable conclusion: she was afraid of black men. Rachel was appalled and decided to do something about it. She tells her story in an article titled, "I am racist and so are you."
Would you prefer to die in your sleep? Turns out, more people who weighed in on our three deaths question chose that option. Many of the people who shared their choices also took the time to write about why they were making their choice. You can read a selection of their responses here, and get some analysis of who wrote and - perhaps - why.
Feminist film critic Molly Haskell talks about how Hollywood has treated the subject of writer’s block, and we hear clips from “Adaptation” and “Barton Fink.”
Peter Kornbluh, directs the National Security Archive’s Chile Documentation Project. He’s just published “The Pinochet File,” which uses recently declassified documents to prove that there was American involvement at the highest levels of government in the efforts to foment chaos in Chile.
Paul Hegarty is a lecturer in Philosophy and Visual Culture at University College Cork in Ireland. He's also really into Noise/Music and is the author of "Noise/Music: A History."
Physicist Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams tell Steve Paulson how humanity has moved back into the center of our myth-making.
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